"If we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow." --John Dewey

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Cast Your Vote on Zoomerang

There's no doubt about it. U.S. Presidential Primaries and the upcoming elections are finding their way into every major newspaper and daily newscast. Chances are good that political banter is finding its way into conversations with your colleagues, and if you teach Social Studies, will undoubtedly soon be finding its way into your curriculum too. Why not make your lessons in democracy come to life by letting your students participate and cast their own votes?

Zoomerang.com is an easy to use website that will allow you to create surveys/polls that you can embed in your class website or blog. Your students can vote for presidential candidates, oscar-worthy movies, the basketball team's most valuable player or a name for you new class pet. Need to include a picture so that your students will more easily recognize those presidential candidates? Zoomerang makes it easy to select and upload your images for inclusion in the survey. You can even get parents involved in your project by sending the survey directly from the Zoomerang site to their emails, which you can manually add or import into your Zoomerang address book. Do your students have their own school email addresses? With a little imagination, Zoomerang becomes a versatile online quiz tool.

With the ability to add multiple choice, rating, ranking or open-ended questions, Zoomerang allows you to easily collect a lot of information, from a lot of people, for a lot of different purposes. That's a lot of reasons to give Zoomerang a try!

There are, of course, many other options for online polling. If you're a fan of a particular site, share your endorsement by completing the sample Zoomerang survey below. I'd love to hear about your experiences.